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  Some Stanford researchers dredged out the absolute dregs of r/AmITheAsshole for all those stories where _zero_ humans supported the poster, where one hundred percent of them said yes, you are unambiguously the asshole, and fed them into LLMs as first person scenarios to see what the LLM had to say. Unethical, harmful, cruel, criminal, didn't matter: the slopbots took the faux poster's side about half the time. Edit: preprint on arxiv https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01395 https://www.scienc...

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  This is important: https://sheets.works/data-viz/holding-up-the-internet SQLite is everywhere and in everything, and it is not an exaggeration that if there's an undiscovered date-based bug in SQLite the world stops on that day. But there are many, many pieces of software like that, built and maintained by people you've never heard of who often as not are barely scraping by.

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  RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jedbrown/117375142044365834 A true thing about llm-generated slop-art is that reliance on a machine that strips any creative work of context, history or intention leaves the people using it regurgitating this muddy-echo retroslurry with no way to understand or even see what they're looking at. Somebody tasked ChatGPT with making this poster, and ChatGPT gave them the box Microsoft FrontPage 2000 came in back when software shipped in boxes.

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  Gasoline-only cars have dropped below fifty percent of global sales for the first time. That second-derivative downturn has been clear for a while now, but this feels like an important milestone. https://www.autoevolution.com/news/gasoline-only-cars-lose-global-sales-majority-276570.html

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  TIL: only three movies have swept picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay at the Oscars: "It Happened One Night", "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", and "The Silence of the Lambs". Bugs Bunny was created as a parody of Clark Gable's character from It Happened One Night, who talked through a mouthful of carrots in one scene as a gag. But wild rabbits don't eat root vegetables. So today, people feed carrots to pet rabbits because of a 1940 ca...

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  When MCP landed with no concept at all of authentication or access controls I knew we'd end up here. https://mastodon.social/@Viss/116020425396491319

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  RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117334191597306849 Microsoft shipped Cortana, named for the Master Chief's AI companion, forcing OEMs to put a dedicated Cortana button on their keyboards. Shortly afterwards in the Halo storyline, Cortana takes a heel turn and goes insane, so while Microsoft's Cortana is eventually discontinued here in real life everyone who bought a computer during this period has a keyboard with a dedicated but non-functional Malevolent AI Villain button on...

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  RE: https://weatherishappening.network/@wordshaper/117345126225966732 A friend of mine who practices law in Canada tells me that this was a problem until he started insisting that every citation include a hyperlink to the specific case law being cited, and just this practice - forcing people to actually find the case or statute they're citing and check the model's claims - has largely solved it. But this only works if case law and statutes are freely available in the public record, not...

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  RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/117323421160842205 The people are divided on this issue.

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  Putting umlauts over all the Os in the Ikea parking lot: crime?

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  RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/117325780028188383 The part that is the most insulting, looking over this, is that there is not a single new idea, insight or engineering process in it. There never is. Every time there's an accidental code dump from a centibillion-dollar oligslopolist valley techcorp's newest bauble, announced by somebody cosplaying Steve Jobs and braying innovation innovation innovation, you crack it open and it's linux and some black-box model wrapped in cron jobs,...

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  RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117324790823856750 An insane thread about facebook’s new personal AI assist politely dumping its guts because @jonny@neuromatch.social asked it nicely. The only AI security policy that matters is “don’t”.

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  "Dubai Chocolate", buying EA, the whole Mr. Beast sponsorship, they were signals as clear as an air horn, but if the Saudis are making EVs now you have to know that in the innermost petrostate circles, in locked boardrooms you and I will never see, the writing is on the wall. https://electrek.co/2026/09/21/ceer-unveils-exobot-evs-saudi-arabias-first-electric-vehicles/

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  One of the funnier implications of the "It's an older code, sir, but it checks out" line from Star Wars is that credential revocation is a much more difficult problem than artificial gravity, integrated bioprostheses, interstellar faster-than-light travel or hard-AI. Remember, that line is spoken by _Admiral_ Piett; so - long ago, in a galaxy far far away - fleet-level auth and cert management was important enough that it was one of a flag officer's main duties. https://info...

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  I think I could help with the management and advising part but I don't think I'd make a very good bus.

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  Everyone involved in Android Auto takes the Google bus to work. https://9to5google.com/2026/09/22/android-auto-rolls-out-game-support-no-longer-in-beta/

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  Getting a python project with some elaborate dependencies going on Debian and once again I need to ask why people think it's ok to live like this.

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  Incredibly grateful that I can ride a bike.

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@vitaut/117315517159165310 “But I specifically told it not to do that” - someone at Meta probably.

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  Aaaaalmost ready to try switching to Android for a daily driver, now that I've got a rooted device and I can inspect/uninstall a lot of junk it came with. My last two hurdles before I move the sim card over are "copies of everything that looked weird in the preinstall" and "carefully walk the permissions list again". Call me crazy, but the camera doesn't need permission to install apps, and the extra few dozen MB of preexisting data in Gboard are ... interesting. I...

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  RE: https://infosec.exchange/@Diami03/117315085960820858 I basically wait until @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social, @zackwhittaker@mastodon.social or @briankrebs@infosec.exchange tell me I need to be paying attention. If @hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange, @thegrugq@infosec.exchange or @wendynather@infosec.exchange weigh in on whatever it is, then I go looking for the key that unlocks the red button. If @thegibson@masto.hackers.town, @campuscodi@mastodon.social, @nullagent@partyon.xyz, @SwiftOnSec...

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  RE: https://universeodon.com/@punissuer/117303516341573544 "Once more, let me remind you what fascism is. It need not wear a brown shirt, or a green shirt - it may even wear a dress shirt. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.” - Tommy Douglas

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  An question I never found an answer to, when I last asked it in I think 2019: I’m already in a Linux, of whatever flavor, is there a way for me plug a new, bare hard drive in and say “turn this new drive into a bootable install that’s just about identical to the machine I'm currently using?" I don't necessarily mean bit-for-bit "identical" - clone meaning "working, identical boot process, same .debs installed" would be a solid start.

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  My favourite thing about Google products is how you can turn off any and every setting you want and they’ll just ignore that if they feel like it so somebody’s number goes up but oopsies.

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  RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@eniko/117292152041410285 When Adults say "kids should go outside instead of playing online all the time" I sometimes wonder when they last left the house without their car keys. I heard this once from somebody whose neighborhood doesn't even have sidewalks.

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  April 2025: https://www.forbes.com/sites/douglaslaney/2025/04/09/selling-ai-strategy-to-employees-shopify-ceos-manifesto/ September 2026: https://fortune.com/2026/09/17/shopify-tobias-lutke-ai-slop-grenades/ hashtag visionary

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@etchedpixels/117293032342505540 People forget that their antilock brakes, insulin pumps and pacemakers have software in them.

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  This is too good. https://social.bau-ha.us/@raganwald/117289196373408499

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  I'm currently trying to help my child through a capital-I Incident with the stage crew at her school, after a teacher who spent an hour "learning" how a complex lighting system works by chatting with Gemini for an hour might have wrecked that system beyond repair. That teacher is now giving them a talk about "accountability". These kids have been keeping this antiquated system running on a shoestring budget for years.

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  No disrespect to well intentioned people but everyone who is telling anyone to self host needs to sit down in front of a computer and walk through all the steps of doing that. Write them all down, every step from "I want to self host my stuff" to "A URL I can share that points to stuff I made that I can get paid for". And then do it again with a phone.